For now, my friend seemed content to just trot alongside of me without leaving me in the dust like he did the day before with our escort quest. Whether it was because he didn’t feel like playing bait himself, or he was worried about me being attacked on my own I wasn’t sure, but I was grateful for the company. Already I had stumbled several times, the ringing in my head was still throwing me off and I was starting to wonder if my eardrum had burst.
Falling to my knees when my foot hit a loose rock I hadn’t noticed, I let go of my weapon and went with the fall. I tried to roll so I wouldn’t end up twisting my ankle. Years of injuries playing sports in high school and as a young adult before I had kids, had left me well trained in how to avoid making the damage worse. Pulling my pant leg up, I saw that I had started bleeding through the bandage covering up my earlier goblin bite. Apparently, I had bumped into something in my fall and the adrenaline just wasn’t letting it register yet.
The bear was right by my side in an instant, again I felt a weird sensation as he started licking at the wound, tingles were shooting up and down my leg as he applied his healing power to me. Amazed at how quickly I started feeling better, I left off unwrapping the bandage to look at how much healing had occurred, anxious to continue our flight to safety. With our having been jogging for around fifteen minutes now I was estimating we were a third of the way to the northern point of the forest. I had thought about heading to the east originally, anxious to leave the tree line and get out into the grasslands.
I had thought better of it after a couple of steps and turned north instead. All getting out of the woods meant was that more parties of goblins had a better chance of seeing us as we made our way north along the tree line. If we cut straight north it was less distance to travel and after we were out of the woods, there was only the risk of being overtaken, and I didn’t think the midgets had it in them to accomplish that. Even unencumbered pigs weren’t the fastest of animals, usually preferring to use their greater bulk and numbers to fight, rather than flee.
Taking a minute to rest after standing and regaining my weapon. I stood up straight and forced myself not to pant to regain my breath. Hearing the commotion coming from the south of us I was grateful not to hear anything that might be some kind of signal to whatever patrols might be in front of us. As the thought went flashing through my head, I almost reached out physically to pull it back from the aether. What was amusing back in a world without life and death struggles was hell in this new environment. Too often had my foolishness called down disasters that could have been avoided had I managed to keep my mind blank and avoided pissing off the gods of this world that seemed to be reading my every taunt just waiting to capitalize on my hubris.
With my breath finally being caught and my leg having been patched up by my friendly bear, I picked up my spear and continued my loping pace to freedom. Not even ten feet into my new pace, I started hearing horns blast out behind us. Not wanting to waste my breath, I held myself back from cursing out at the unfairness of a world that took every thought I had so seriously. Wondering if we should cut out in a different direction I instead decided again to hold our course. Without knowing what the signals meant, I had no idea if that would get us to miss any of the patrols, for all I knew there weren’t any goblins directly in front of us on their patrol, and swerving in a different direction might just give them enough time to send some of their people directly at the direction of the rabbit woods.
After all, between the scream and the flashes of purple they had to know that the rabbits were involved, and even if they couldn’t invade the wood there was only one place for us to go to escape. “No, better to keep going with a straight shot and plow through any groups we might run into.” As the bear looked over at me, I realized I had said the last thought out loud.
“Just talking to myself,” I said to reassure him that I wasn’t going crazy. As we continued to head north I had a nagging feeling that I was missing something running through my head, but with no time to stop and think I just had to hope that it wasn’t anything too important. I really wished the hamster in my head had some kind of filter or way to signal to me whether or not something was important or not. The number of times he had nagged for my attention only to tell me he had new ideas for rubs or brines was insane.
Not that I didn’t appreciate the effort he went in for new ideas, but having to stop myself from jumping up and shouting in the middle of one of my kid’s games just because he wanted to flip around and change the ratio of spicy ingredients was incredibly annoying. But conversely, the number of times he had saved me money by reminding me I had a credit card payment due was also well worth the effort of keeping him happy. I just had to hope that for now he was coming up with plans for the pigs that were hopefully waiting for us, and he wasn’t holding back info on our incoming doom.
As the bear and I split up to dodge around a larger specimen of pine tree in our way, we ran into four of the harvester goblins coming our way. Two had spears, while one carried a club and the last was left weaponless but for what he had been born with. Unfortunately for me, that still left him as a danger to my supple hide, while I was sure the bear wasn’t worried. It looked like all of them realized that I was the only threat they had the slightest chance of taking out. The two with spears sent them flying through the air at me, while the two melee fighters also looked to be trying to avoid the bear in their effort to claim me for an opponent. Grateful that they hadn’t kept the spears for when I was more distracted, I waved my own longer weapon through the air to knock the flying toothpicks from the sky.
Knowing we didn’t have a lot of time to waste on the vermin, the bear hadn’t stopped running at all, lowering his head he plowed into them, sending the club and bag wielder sprawling. Not willing to be undone, as the two former spear wielders started charging at me, I lowered the point of my weapon and drove forward aiming for the right hand one. Telegraphing the move, I hoped to bait the two of them into trying to work together to counter me. As I got within striking distance of them I pivoted and thrust at the left handed one’s chest, driving it in until the stop lifted the smaller creature up off of his feet.
Cursing when the right one didn’t stop, I had hoped my aiming for him would cause him to stop and try to grab at the spear, entangling it to give his fellow attacker a better chance at getting to me. Apparently, the monster had just been happy to suicidally use his body for the task and hadn’t paused in the slightest, and now that the path in front of him was free of obstruction he was smiling in glee at the meal that was waiting for him.
The crash of the spear into the first goblin had stopped most of my momentum, with my left foot forward, I tried for the briefest of instants to pivot back and use the haft of the spear to knock the lone attacker off of his feet, but couldn’t manage to get it around in time. Giving up as soon as I felt it wasn’t going to work, I instead backed to the left and threw the haft forward into the charging goblins’ way. Continuing to back up, I left the club alone as I didn’t have the time to untie it, instead, I pulled out my ax and knife, holding the latter in a reverse grip.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Walking backward, I held the blade out across my forearm to ward off any claw strikes from the monster that had only paused an instant, before dodging around my abandoned spear to keep coming at me. A swipe from my ax finally forced him to pause for a second and jump back in the first sign of self preservation I had yet to see from any of the fodder goblins. Previously I had only ever seen those kinds of instincts from the shield bearing types.
Waving my ax another time in an obvious threat to keep its attention on me, I planned on bringing my longer blade around, flipping it in my hand to drive into his abdomen. Apparently, my partner wasn’t content to wait for me to set up the perfect kill shot. The bear charged up behind the goblin, skidding to a stop he bit straight through its neck, and popped the head completely off, spraying me in a shower of arterial blood. Wiping my face off with my arm, I gave the bear a look that indicated that might have been a little excessive, but seeing as he had no doubt saved me from the several claw wounds that I would have suffered getting the job done myself, I let the matter go without saying anything.
As I felt the build-up of kill energy forming, we didn’t have time to stick around and wait for the ensuing aftermath of the green energy to appear, let alone take any time to dig out the cores. With the horns still blaring behind us, I found myself wondering if we would be able to outrun the incoming energy as I had yet to try that particular maneuver. We continued our steady pace to the north. Realizing what the hamster had been calling out to me earlier, our earlier two kills of the pigs hadn’t caused either of the two forces to appear.
For the first time on this world, we had killed some kind of native and not been assaulted by angry forces trying to rip our sense of self apart. Ignoring that revelation for now as I had to deal with the kill energy that was still forming. I did my best to turn my breathing to the pattern that I had discovered would form a shield earlier, Unfortunately, my lack of practice at moving meditation was looking to be coming back to bite me in the butt. Fortunately, these were only fodder goblins so it should be nothing for me to ignore them. With how often this was happening, I was becoming quite inured to the invading energy.
Thinking back to other anomalies that I had encountered I remembered that when I was drawing out the evil energy that was empowering the troll core, the final goblin I had killed had none of the green after energy, but even it had still sent out the angry precursor. Wondering if they were related, I had to pause my musing as the first of the incoming death energy started diving into my center. Gasping at the sudden hit of pain it seemed to cause, I forced my focus to stay with my body rather than diving into my core to defend.
As a roar rang out from my right, I could see the bear looking concerned that I wasn’t keeping up. Wishing I knew how he was able to deal with the funnels so easily now I wondered if I still had the larger amount of energy being sent towards me. This was the first time both of us had been uninjured and the bear had a higher kill count than me and I was curious to see if he had the larger funnel for once. Being able to nail down a variable that would mean the amount received was based on one’s actions and not implied sapience would be a real boon. I really wanted to turn around and look but was able to stuff down my curiosity and keep going. I was sure I would get my answers eventually as the elder seemed to have indicated in our conversations that the only way for us to continue growing stronger was fighting enemies of the opposing faction.
While I wasn’t sure if as a nonnative to this world had a faction I belonged to, the greenskins chasing us seemed content to think I was their enemy. While they may have some point to those thoughts with the constant raiding I had done. They had no way of knowing all of those troubles had been caused by me, as I, for now, had yet to leave any witnesses behind.
Still feeling the aching in my chest, I tried to force myself to continue dropping into my breathing pattern while continuing to charge to the north and our eventual escape. I was really coming to regret any of my previous negative thoughts toward MCs who never bothered to learn how to meditate and regain mana on the move. Clearly, that was a much higher level skill than I had thought from the comfort of my couch, and I needed to work on leveling up my own version of it. Again I felt a wave of agony shooting through me and I stumbled to a stop and forced myself to breathe carefully.
As the pain in my center began to slowly lessen, I forced myself to stay focused on watching my surroundings instead of diving into my core and trying to control the fight against the invading emotions. As Gaian came back to stand next to me and nuzzled my hand, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The sudden resumption of pain had me quickly trying to calm my heart again which was beating in overdrive. I was surprised to see him clear eyed and friendly, every other encounter had him lost in a rage at this point.
Well, that’s not true, I thought to myself. I don’t remember how he reacted when we had the goblin fight when my ribs had been bruised. I had been lying in agony on the ground when the invading energy had hit me and I had been in no condition to check in on my companion until he had taken the time to heal my ribs. At that point, I had just assumed he had already dealt with his problems.
Shaking myself out of my musings, I realized that the invading energy had finally disappeared out of me. Hoping that I had made some gains with my breathing exercises, I rubbed the bear’s ears and said, “Okay, all better now, let’s keep going.” Taking my own advice, I started jogging to the north again and was quickly caught up to and overtaken by my self-appointed bodyguard.
Ten more minutes of running and I knew we had to be getting close to the edge of the woods. Suddenly I heard a horn going off to our right. Cursing as it sounded incredibly close, I tried to up my pace from the light jog I was currently at, to something that more resembled running. Holding the pace for two minutes, I eventually had to drop back down to a fast walk as my lungs were heaving so hard I thought they would burst. Hearing the horns still closing in, I was worried that this was going to be it. Soon enough, I would finally learn what it was like to be in the shoes of all of those animals that I had ever been forced to track down after my first shot hadn’t been good enough to end their lives instantly.
To be fair there had been very few times that that had happened. I’m not trying to imply that I am some kind of amazing shot. Instead, I would be happier saying that I know when I’m not sure and I refuse to take a shot I am not sure will end the animal’s life instantly. I have always regretted the times I had overestimated my abilities. I really feel like that is the worst kind of sin a person can have the arrogance to not be capable of accurately judging how well you can do a task. Every time I have ever failed to live up to what I have committed to I have been ruthless in my self-criticism.
As I continued to hobble along at a fast walk while doing my best to suck down air. I could only hope that the goblins would be nice enough to kill me here instead of bringing me back to prolong my misery. Hearing the horns continue to close in, I told the bear. “Alright, you better get out of here. No use getting caught with me, it seems like we really kicked the hornet’s nest this time.”
The bear turned to me with a look of disgust on his face. He instead crouched down to the ground in an obvious invitation. I would like to say I fought with him for several minutes because I was too proud to risk slowing him down and was properly heroic and manly in my insistence that I stay behind and make a last stand so he could escape. Instead, I hopped on without saying a word, if he was willing to offer, I wasn’t going to let myself be eaten out of some kind of misplaced pride.
The bear broke into a sprint that forced me to hold on tightly with my knees and grab onto the ruff of his neck with my free hand while my right did its best to maintain its grip on my favorite weapon. I’m sure if this was a story we would have been ducking and weaving through the trees dodging thrown spears and just barely making it to the grasslands ahead of our pursuers. Maybe if I had hesitated and argued with him for a bit that is what would have happened. Instead, I think we both breathed a sigh of relief when we made it to the edge of the woods and left the horns behind, without catching the slightest glimpse of the monsters blowing them.